Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, following a pipeline through a "production-like environment", without doing so manually. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery. Continuous delivery contrasts with continuous deployment (also abbreviated CD), a similar approach in which software is also produced in short cycles but through automated deployments even to production rather than requiring a "click of a button" for that last step. As such, continuous deployment can be viewed as a more complete form of automation than continuous delivery. Continuous delivery and DevOps are similar in their meanings and often conflated, but they are two different concepts. DevOps has a broader scope, and centers around cultural change, specifically the collaboration of the various teams involved in software delivery (developers, operations, quality assurance, management, etc.), as well as automating the processes in software delivery. Continuous delivery, on the other hand, is an approach to automate the delivery aspect and focuses on bringing together different processes and executing them more quickly and frequently. Thus, DevOps can be a product of continuous delivery, and CD flows directly into DevOps. Continuous deployment Continuous delivery is the ability to deliver software that can be deployed at any time through manual releases; this is in contrast to continuous deployment which uses automated deployments. According to Martin Fowler, continuous deployment requires continuous delivery. Academic literature differentiates between the two approaches according to deployment method; manual vs. automated.

Expect the Unexpected

Georgeta Geambasu

This study originates from the recognition that project management research is replete with normative theories on what need projects to be successful. However, it has performed worse with respect to assisting the understanding of how and why similar projects do not have similar performances during their life-cycles. It claims that the poor performance of major infrastructure projects, acknowledged by cost overruns and scheduling delays, is due to their lack of resilience when confronted with critical events that are inherent in their life-cycle. Therefore, it addresses the overarching question: How do projects cope with the critical events that occur at some point in their life-cycle? And why and how are some troubled projects able to maintain positive adjustments (cope successfully) while others cannot? By addressing these questions, the first goal of this study is to reveal the "resilience enablers". These are factors and conditions enabling the successful coping process (maintaining performance after the critical event) in projects confronted with unexpected events. The second goal is to translate the new knowledge of "resilience enablers" into recommendations for practitioners to enable them to actually make use of the insight into a troubled project's behavior. To study these questions, a qualitative research design was developed. It is articulated on the exploratory case study of one of the most important infrastructure project of this century. The result consists of two sets of findings, both relate to the critical events' managements and the factors and conditions that enabled the project's resilience. This thesis contributes to project management research with a middle range theory. The project performance can be seen and explained from a new and original perspective of project resilience. It also contributes to the project's management practice with recommendations aiming to help project actors to 1) identify and assess the resilience of their project organization, along with the identification and management of the risks. And to 2) maintain project system performance after the critical event through continuous adoption of risk-focused, and protection-focused strategies, which imply uncostly measures that enable project resilience.

EPFL2011

Expect the Unexpected

Georgeta Geambasu

EPFL2011

Efficient carbon-based adsorbers for the continuous elimination of polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs) from drinking waters

Expect the Unexpected

Efficient carbon-based adsorbers for the continuous elimination of polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs) from drinking waters

Expect the Unexpected